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i live in the u.s. and when going to court to contest a speeding ticket, i happened to glance at the officer's internal paperwork while talking to him. on his paper were three checkboxes: "+10 mph under limit (obstructing traffic)", "+10 over limit (speeding)", and "+15 over limit (reckless driving)". Going <10 over the limit is perfectly legal and going >15 will get you into some deep shit in regards to fines, loss of points, and possible jail time. i bring this up any time some moron wants to argue about "fast lanes" on the highway. rest assured that anyone who is dumb/gullible enough to believe in fast lanes on highways is a cop's best friend.

That might be a better & cheaper solution once it's done . But it isn't nearly as scalable as putting sensors on cars and linking the cars together. Let's say you only have money for 5 sensors. You can put them on 5 cars or at 5 fixed points along the road. If you put them along the road, there is going to be a lot of dead zones with no sensor coverage. But if they're on the cars, then there are no dead spots. There is sensor coverage wherever the car needs it because the car carries it along. In the spots where there are sensors it may very well work better than having the sensor on the car, but it only works there.

Driverless' is a convenient word to use for Google because it implies what most people would think when they hear the word. The problem you have is that word structures are not a very effective way of looking at real-world considerations. You're quite right that a driverless car doesn't have the standard mechanical interaction that one would expect from a car, but that doesn't mean it's without some form of driver. By driver, I mean a person that is in charge of making the decisions for that vehicle. In this proximate example, the driver is the person that commands the vehicle to do something. Let me ask you a very simple question: what do you think when you hear the following phrase: Yeah, the car I purchased is automatic, it's great! Do you see how the language we use here is problematic if you take the phrases used to their most literal forms? After all, automatic means that it does everything by itself. But surely an automatic car would be what a driverless car is, right? I mean, the wording doesn't really imply that it just manages gear changes. Sometimes, we use convenient words in order to make concepts simple. It just so happens that are language is full of things we accept as being reasonable descriptions of things that, if taken literally, are not true. Not convinced? How about these: [Decaffeinated coffee]( [Unlimited breadsticks]( [Non-lethal weapon]( To conclude and

I'm not sure I agree. Think of the amount of roadways we have. Most of this roadway is at the moment utterly passive - most of it is even unlit at night, using only reflective elements that work with headlights to provide a bit of guidance. If you want to introduce active motion detection to the entire road network, well that is a MAJOR introduction of infrastructure. Detectors, running power to them (or millions of solar units and millions of batteries), some sort of transmitter and network administration so the sensors can communicate useful data to cars... And what is this for? To keep cars from running into deer? The interstate highway system already does a fairly good job of this thanks to good old low-tech fences. Fences don't require much maintenance or regular replacement, at least not compared to network-capable motion detectors. In contrast, sensors of all sorts are already becoming standard on new cars these days. Any self-driving car is going to chock full of them already. Add a few more, develop some software, and cars can potentially avoid almost every deer out there. Not to mention the fact that the cars will be communicating with each other - if a car 1/4 mile in front of you detects heat and motion approaching the road beside it, it will tell your car, and your car will avoid it - or slow down to have more time to react. Anyway this is a non-issue. Truly high speeds will only happen on specific highways. They will have tall fences to keep out game.

The malware was apparently able to use the search function on Reddit to locate comments that were left by the hackers in a discussion pertaining to Minecraft on the site. The Reddit thread has been shut down since. However, it is likely that the malware's creators have put up an alternate server list elsewhere. Currently, it seems that the botnets are not being used to generate any attacks and the hackers are likely expanding their network as of now. They aren't using Reddit as an infection source, they're posting bot server data to Reddit in the form of random comments, as a proxy since they don't want to use their own server, since then that'll identify them.

Eh, I'm not one to post usually, but I recently switched to Apple and i was pretty surprised how well things just worked and fit into the narratives of today's culture. Put simply, technology is used for its usefulness. It sounds pretty cliche but.. Have you used a macbook recently? The trackpad experience is unreal, the battery last 12hrs+ and I've naturalised to the gestures. Plus the thing looks great, runs most cross-platform apps well enough for me (except Microsoft Excel.. very unsure about that one). Apple TV so simple that I managed to teach my Asian mother how it! There was no real need for use to have Foxtel (overpriced Australian cable vs. Unblockus. + Neflix is an unfair battle) and it didn't take long until they disconnected their cable service. Simplicity is of the essence in tech platforms that will tip the critical mass past the early adopters. A lot of technology adoption literature talks a lot of the 'perceived usefulness' of a technology with the specificities (job relevance, output quality) as its antecedents.. But ultimately 'perceived ease of use' is its most important and reliable relationship. There is no question that a lot of Android handsets with vastly more advanced specifications than that the current range of iPhone 6(+). I told many friend to buy the HTC One because that (at the time of release) was the most advanced phone. But advancements like NFC payments, bigger screen, better cameras have all been in other ecosystems' devices before Apple's. But we know now that first mover advantage is largely only valuable if people actually fully utilise the bloody thing, or that there is a legible narrative that they can fit into. Apple Pay was a big deal because people actually think that it is viable. They actually talked to the payment providers, the media and provided nice graphics to ensure that it will be used come next week. I'm excited for when it comes to Australia, but the true test will be when I can show it to my mum and she adopts it. Usefulness is very much linked to simplicity and ease of use. Bordieu, a French philosopher in the 80's thought that we ought to differentiate our thoughts of about capital into three categories: economic, cultural and social. If we keep putting money into improving technology (a la Intel's Tick Tock procedure) we will keep becoming more efficient and make a whole lot of economic capital. But how about cultural and social values of technology? iPods have such nostalgia factor that people will probably remember it as being as influential as the record player. The device is easy to use, looks good and with the moderate level of specs that makes it a smooth experience. The iPod wasn't especially technologically advanced but the values derived from its impeccable narrative and ease of use brought amazing social and cultural capital. Watch the film Boyhood and look out for the iPods. I think tech values advancements in economic capital without thinking enough about integration of the social/cultural. I think this is how Apple is still relevant today. I still have a few problems about how they do they manage their ecosystem but hey, it's still the easiest to use experience out there.

I didn't find that the internet was amazingly fast, it's more that there was no slow internet, if that makes sense. And also, it's cheap. Out in Gimpo, my nominal 100 Mb/s was really giving me 60 Mb/s. 60 Mb/s is pretty good, especially for basically $20 a month, but it's not like it's ten times the speed of my Canadian internet. I also found that most of the things that require fast internet weren't really strongly affected by this speed. If you're playing games, the key point is the ping , and having 100 Mb/s throughput on one end doesn't help that much. South Koreans tend to focus on a few particular games, so unless you're playing one of the big ones, you're going to be playing on an international server with a high ping anyway. For many other websites, usually it's the website server that is a bigger bottleneck than your home internet. Reddit gets slow sometimes because Reddit can't handle the load, not because of my home computer. If you're torrenting stuff, it's about finding the seeders - you almost never actually reach your max download speed. I can watch Netflix and Youtube at 1080p on a 15 Mb/s connection, so the extra speed doesn't actually give you anything better than a decent Canadian connection gets you. Phones are a similar story - my phone plan in Korea wasn't really any cheaper than my plan in Canada. I got more more data, but it wasn't amazingly different. The big thing is that you have 3G literally everywhere.

And I'm sitting here with my shitty Hughes Net satellite internet. Other than that pretty much the only other options for internet where I live are other satellite companies or dial up. I get about a 1 mb download speed on a clear day, and practically, if not, nothing if it's storming. And to top it off my family shares a whopping 20 GB per month data cap during the day (8 a.m.- 2 a.m.) and another 20 GB from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. If we exceed that limit our speed reduces to a measly 15 KB per second. We usually end up using the 20 GB about half way through the month every month. At this point I'd gladly deal with all the Comcast bullshit I've been reading about. It's fucking highway robbery the shit these companies get away with.

It's more likely that the brand was called "삼성", or "Three-stars," the literal translation of Samsung. It's a common name in Korea and a lot of smaller brands do carry their name by Samsung (sometimes romanized differently, to Samseong). There's even a subway station in Seoul called "삼성역" which would read like "Samsung Station" to foreigners, but is spelled "Samseong Station". No, the company doesn't own the station.

but we ended up voting in a conservitard government who is ideologically opposed to any policies any other parties have that actually make sense because then they'd have to admit that the other parties are competent and have good ideas. Qualification here because this is important that Americans, who are going through all their shit with Comcast and the two-lane pay-to-play internet, understand just how malicious the attack on free internet is. What actually happened was the conservative government here did a deal with Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch controls vast swaths of print media in this country, which (as in Britain) plays a huge role in determining how large parts of the country votes. The deal the conservatives did was, Murdoch would help them get elected, and the conservatives would oppose fibre-to-the-home - ie, fast broadband. Why did that suit Murdoch? Because he owns the biggest Pay-TV operator here, Foxtel. And internet is a direct threat to Foxtel's woefully outdated but hugely profitable business. So the conservatives killed off fast internet here in return for Murdoch's support. Just how much did that mean to Murdoch, and how much support did it buy? Answer: Murdoch flew out one of his highest Fleet Street (sic) editors in the UK, to spend the entire election campaign out here, directing editorial to get the conservatives elected.

I don't think they will any time soon. The reason machines have so many memory units is because they all have different roles. They differ in capacity, read speed, write speed, volatile/non, cost, pipeline location, etc... Off the top of my head - cpu registers, primary cache, secondary cache, RAM, ROM, GRAM, SSD vs HDD, etc Technological advances in one storage unit can transfer over to the others, but that isn't going to make them equal to the point where there will be one "standard" (other than maybe the flipflops used in low level memory) RAM is named as such because every memory access takes the same amount of time no matter where it's located. Typical drives have to spin so the storage location affects the access time. I'm not exactly sure how this works with solid states, but I'd guess they use a paging algorithm since a 512GB multiplexer would be extremely costly. There's also the issue that non volatile memory (EEPROM, etc) tends to take longer than volatile memory to write to, and there wouldn't be much point to sacrificing speed for non-volatility in memory that's already purely used temporarily (where the speed of many programs is based on waiting for memory to be written)

They just follow the air currents. If you want to see how they do that then just google air currents. Basically they move around a little but mainly just rise and lower in an area. The balloons are actually monitored and can be moved slightly to adjust and move between currents, helping the balloon to remain stable. The balloons also have a much larger range and stronger signal than your average cell tower because they are elevated and can avoid passing through several objects. In cases of natural disasters (cyclones) the process is pretty simple. The balloons are cheap. Very cheap. I'm talking $1300 per balloon. To give you an idea an average cell tower costs $100,000 - $300,000 (for stealth towers) to build. A single loon can be made and launched in two days too. This project is pretty significant. The balloons are incredibly efficient for internet access to the public. Google also have a partnership to create the outernet, a fleet of 143 (don't quote me on the number) satellites to beam internet to the planet. They basically want to own a monopoly over the internet to cut competition completely so that they can supply consumers with every product they want without having to make high prices for consumers.

It is more dangerous to be a citizen of the USA than it is to be a cop. > Police are scared because there are nutcases with guns Well, here is some data. Half of police die from cars, not guns. "About half of fatalities result from traffic accidents. Shootings also account for a high number of deaths, followed by falls and work-related illnesses.' "Firearms-related fatalities reached a 126-year low in 2013 with 31 officers shot and killed, the lowest since 1887 when 27 officers were shot and killed. " List of countries by intentional homicide rate per year per 100,000 inhabitants. Country United States Count 14,827 Year listed 2012 "In 2008, state and local law enforcement agencies employed more than 1.1 million persons on a full-time basis, including about 765,000 sworn personnel (defined as those with general arrest powers). Agencies also employed approximately 100,000 part-time employees, including 44,000 sworn officers" So 100,000 people, 15,000 die every year. (44,000*2) Out of 88,000 cops, only 31 die. Which group has better odds of living another year? Or maybe using the 765,000 is a better number of cops in the usa. Divide both deaths and number of cops by the same number to compare:

Maybe they could put together a "terms of service" movie for when the

Dunno, we finally got a house and got the books out of durance vile and loaded the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" back into daylight. I pulled one at random the other night (Stendahl's The Red and the Black ) and you know what -- a lot of it is seriously BORING. I mean, there's like a seven-page description of a tiny little town, and AFAICT it adds nothing to the story. It doesn't serve as a backdrop, it doesn't set the scene, it doesn't establish a mood -- what it does is drone on for paragraph after paragraph about what the trees looked like, and what the sidewalks looked like, and who lived in what house, and on and on and on. So I put it aside and picked up Huxley's Brave New World , which I haven't read since grade school. Excellent. I savored a good four chapters before I went to bed. Looking forward to reading more tonight.

The sad thing is, my first thought at reading the title is "You know what would be hilarious? If I wrote '

Note however that Android has massive problems with fragmentation: Hardware manufacturers aren't providing an upgrade path for older phones. So already you're seeing phones stuck on 1.6. There is no software on the computer or phone encouraging/forcing people to upgrade. Apple has iTunes doing this. Developers simply can't afford to buy 5 or 6 phones just to test their app. My guess is you will see developers not testing 1.5/1.6 apps and instead relying just on the simulator. The problem is going to get worse as new OS versions come out and you start seeing a wider variety of Android models e.g. in 2011 we will likely see budget 1.6, normal 2.2, pro 3.0 phones. People need to understand that Google actually doesn't give a shit about Android. It just wants it to be wildly successful in order to have a lot of people with the ability to access the web from their phones. More web users = more searching = more advertising = more money. And the Windows style business model is how it achieves it.

Presidential Emergency Powers" is one of the scariest terms I've come to know as a US citizen. The US government should probably figure out how to correctly manage what it already has taken over before it takes control over even more of what the people of the world have built. Voice of the people my ass.

I tend to take a strong philosophical stance on issues of market vs. regulations. The way I see it (yes this is a generalization) governments cannot produce wealth or provide a service by itself. In order to provide something, resources need to be diverted from the private sector. And since the private sector is required by law to maintain capital in order to operate, only it can, necessarily, that is freely, provide a service based on market standards and market forces. The government can simply spend, tax, borrow and inflate whenever a project runs into fiscal trouble. As such there is no market incentive to provide quality service from the public sector. Some examples of govt. programs that may have started well enough but have turned into disasters are NASA, USPS, Dept Education.

i'm an fb app developer (much to my personal annoyance) and the rules don't protect shit. the privacy settings however are actually quite robust. app devs can't see shit about you until you click on that 'allow' button. as a user you have to remember that when you click 'allow' you are 'allowing' that application access to your personal details and, dependent upon the scope of the permissions requested and due to the social nature of the graph, select details of your friends who have more open profiles (you can of course lock this down personally but this is up to individual users). personally, we don't transmit these details to anyone and would never dream of mining and selling user info. it's not our business model and we don't stand to gain anything from it. how our clients deal with the info we capture for them is down to them but the vast majority wouldn't sell this due to the competitive nature of their particular market sectors (primarily commercial music). when companies like this fuck with the system, i can assure you it pisses us honest devs off more than anyone else. the sandbox gets more obtrusive, huge overhauls are made to the API, breaking fucking everything without so much as a word from fb's roadmap dept. and we spend the following weeks getting calls from pissed off clients asking why their apps have stopped working and trying hopelessly to replicate the same functionality with a new, increasingly broken system.

None of them LIE about connection speeds. The advertised speeds are a maximum (i.e. your connection is capped at that speed, should you reach it). The vast majority of copper wire install in the UK adds a large amount of noise to the line, thus the further you live from the telephone exchange (in cable length) the slower your received connection speed is. I live 2 minutes walk from my exchange - I get 19Mb/s of my advertised 24Mb/s. Where I used to live, I was several miles from my exchange, and I got <1Mb/s of my advertised 8Mb/s. The ISPs are not lying at all. They are serving to you exactly what you pay for - the ability for your connection to go up to a certain speed at the exchange. Should the equipment between the exchange and your house be crap, that's not their issue. If you are getting crap speeds, there's not much you can do. But consider paying less for a lower speed cap on your internet connection. Sadly, this will be the case until the infrastructure is upgraded. This is slowly being done, but for now most are stuck with copper wire that was installed well before the internet was even thought of.

Reminds me of a book I once ... bought at a used book sale? took out of the library? I forget. "How to Build A Computer At Home" or somesuch. This thing was Prim-I-Tive with a capital P -- it had you winding large-diameter copper wire into coils to make your own lightbulb sockets. I read through the whole thing looking to find out how they did the "computing" part, and after a hundred pages of making your own input switches, "memory" drum (!), output lightbulb sockets, etc., it turned out that that was ALL there was to the hardware -- YOU did the actual computing and made the inputs turn into the outputs. I have rarely been so disappointed in my life.

Not in the forseeable future. For something like the mouse and keyboard to go away, something will have to come along that is both easier to use and has no drawbacks. Touch screens are becoming a big thing in mobile devices but they suck when on a full size scale if you are trying to do even basic web navigation, the loss of tactile sense kills it. It's fine a on phone or tablet because you are constantly looking at the screen, I don't look at my keyboard while typing.

I think part of it is usability. I know several developers that write for Windows but do so in a Mac or Linux environment. They want something that won't crash and I think a lot of people lost faith in Microsoft after 98 second edition really... 2k-Vista era was alot of experimental stuff, and 7 is now much better off for it I believe. A colleague of mine believes 8 is a lot like Windows Phone 7 and he's probably right. For him, that's a negative, but really what's wrong with creating an environment that is more universal?

that's how I felt about it too. Without DVDs, the streaming wasn't worth the bother since they never had any of the more recent movies, and $8 for a DVD service was overpriced given that I have a redbox 3 blocks from my house and I pass it on the way to and from work. Sure, it's nice to watch old cartoons with my son over the streaming service on occasion, but it certainly wasn't a must-have for me, given that I still pay for TV service.

Stocks lead to short term thinking, That's not necessarily true and is really an extreme oversimplification of the way the stock market works. Companies react to stock price fluctuations all the time, for better or worse. You think Apple buying Next in 1997 and reinstating Steve Jobs was a long term strategy or a reaction to a floundering stock price? If you're inclined to say long-term, then explain to me why they made him the interim CEO and didn't just give him the job. > so we can now leave the fucked Netflix Please, give me 3 good reasons why Netflix is so fucked. And them changing their prices is not a good reason. Companies change their prices all the time. My favorite restaurant just upped the price of my favorite appetizer $2.

Solar energy is not necessarily free to the consumer. You probably pay a feed-in tarriff to subsidize the cost of the utility buying the energy at above-wholesale price. Reversing the direction of flow in distribution systems can absolutely cause problems. Protective systems were made to flow one direction. Fixing this requires replacing devices and redesigning circuits. Often, these are multi-element systems which respond to events with a sequence of events to properly reset without causing long outages. Replacing weak feeders (community-level power lines), especially those in urban areas, can be expensive as many of these lines run underground through highly populated areas. Undervoltages and overvoltages will happen with solar, or with light loads in general. I'm still trying to understand this, but many of my colleagues studying solar on distribution systems have seen this. Just this week, the editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery gave a seminar at my department, speaking to this very issue. Solar output can change drastically within a few minutes because of cloud cover - more drastically than wind even. This drastic change in output will affect the flow across a feeder. What was a small voltage drop due to light load (mostly covered by PV) can very quickly become a much larger drop, if that PV cuts out (Load will not likely decrease, so extra power must come from elsewhere in the grid). This is especially likely if your feeder or transmission cables are small, thus have high impedance. This kind of behavior is disruptive in a way that more scheduled and predictable uni-directional power flows aren't. All of that rambling is to say that, yes, solar PV panels in distributed generation will impact the grid in potentially negative ways. That isn't to say you shouldn't build them. But, they pose technical challenges for power systems engineers, and they may require upgrades of parts of the network to properly accomodate them.

The difference is in reading levels. Bastiat is hard to read for a lot of people. Its very "highbrow", which in the world of

Which is why an "Internet tribute to Ray Bradbury" is hilarious. The factoid "Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship!" is so well established because so few people have actually read the book. People want

I go through the same type of situation with modern rap music. A lot of my peers criticize me for listening to it. I like to listen to it because I feel energized and alive when I do. I don't really pay attention to the lyrics 80% of the time. I know some of the lyrics are obscene, but I don't really care. The beats get me pumping, and in no time I'm envisioning an abstract movie in my head, starring me. It's fun to listen to, and if there was a station that had instrumental versions maybe I'd tune into that instead. But the minute someone tells me "rap isn't even music" I immediately tune them out because they've already let me know they have nothing worthwhile to say. Music is organized sound and everyone prefers different arrangements of sound. I hate De Stijl but I'm not going to tell an admirer "dude that ain't art, let me hook you up with some nice Impressionism instead."

How about we award a URL to somebody or something that matters in the computing/internet world? think about it, Ray Bradbury thought the internet was a distraction and a bad thing. he openly spoke about how F-451 is not about censorship. The internet is actually the EXACT opposite of what F-451 is about. Ray Bradbury wanted to express that context is key, and that television rips any context out of a story. now look at the internet. I LOVE Bradbury's work, and my personal favorite "something wicked this way comes" is astounding. don't get me wrong, i like him alot, he IS the cats pajamas, but its just the opposite to relevant to name this URL after his book. If Bradbury was around today even he would disapprove. if you want a URL that has some meaning why not error.1822? as in the date of the first computers invention, or even better why not error.408 after silicon valley's area code, this one would be extra special because silicon valley is changing its area code.

But if someone else liked it, don't judge them for it. I don't even try to like Rand, I find her ideas to be so objectionable that I can barely even entertain them for the purposes of criticism. I wouldn't expect you to feel the same, but that's exactly the point - if you can read Rand and not be repulsed, then what kind of values do you have (in relation to my own)?

I take it you didn't click the [Why Facebook?]( link.

Facebook will eventually crash and burn like Yahoo! and Myspace. Yahoo?! I never saw them as a social networking site but even so it's the 4th most popular website on the entire web which is pretty far from crashing and burning. Yahoo isn't a player in search or social networking but I believe they are succeeding as sort of catch all portal (news, email, etc.). They are also huge when it comes to sports, I know several people in my little circle who get their sports news from Yahoo Sports entirely. Also it was Yahoo journalists who broke a huge booster scandal involving the Miami Hurricanes not long ago. Yahoo is huge in the fantasy sports market as well.

1) buying instantgram removes a potential competitor from the market. instantgram had the potential to become the sort of danger twitter is right now. 2) facebook's photosharing were not up to par compared to competitors that focuses exclusively on that area. buying instangram allows them to improve on that by integrating the service into facebook proper. facebook spent 1% of its 3) the deal isnt 1 bil for an app. its 1% of its value for a solid foothold in the photosharing business (one of the most important core parts of social media). shittons of other reasons exist, i dont have the time.

1) there are dozens of other potential competitors and every year there will be dozens more. Is buying them up for 1b each a viable way to maintain control over the market. 2) facebooks photo sharing capabilities are at least a magnitude greater than Instagram. You could argue that their mobile experience isn't up to snuff but they have half a billion mobile users so you can't argue they didn't have penetration. 3) it's 1b for a fad product. Dismissive statement.

It looks nice(r than my [___] ever did before, which isn't really saying much), but before we get all worked up about the fact that it's no longer vomiting a pile of My First HTML and crushing your browser with a deluge of autoplaying music and animated .gifs, I'd like to see the whole thing in action by actual users. Once we see how it performs and how they support their platform, maybe I'll be impressed. However, I doubt I'll ever be going back because bands were the most annoying part of the site to me. Frankly, being in L.A. and focusing on that content will almost certainly lead to increased partnering with corporate media **AA stooges, which I won't support no matter how slick the UI looks.

Diaspora lost so much ground/hype when it was discovered that the original people coding it were really bad coders, and that it was plagued with security holes. Many sources were available that confirmed this (Slashdot ripped it apart, as did GitHub, if I recall correctly). Just how bad were these security holes? Well, you could: Access anyone's personal information, regardless of their consent/settings; Change anyone's personal information, regardless of their consent/settings; Upload data/comments/etc. as someone else's profile, regardless of their consent/settings. I mean, for a social media application that advertised on the "secure and private, with no middleman storing your data" this is a huge problem. I doubt they'll ever really recover from it, but only time will tell.

Of course I know nothing about journalism, I'm too busy writing code. That's the point. The Register serves a specific niche of IT professionals people who just want relevant, and up to date detailed news about non-consumer services and products. News about consumer products only make up a minority of articles, which are reported in such a cynical way because their readership aren't really interested anyway.

No, we're downvoting you because your comment espouses your opinion but does not back it up well with facts and sources, or points of contention. You also seem to misunderstand what ThePirateBay is. ThePirateBay and its owners do not steal products or copy them, they only host a site where files are able to be shared with minimal liability issues. All files and "stolen content" are uploaded by the users, not by ThePirateBay. Some of what ThePirateBay enables is largely considered wrong, but you're failing to see the shades of grey in the situation.

I'm a little bit confused as to why this is so concerning. Let me explain: I know that if this vote succeeded and if the ITU successfully took over the Internet and if they were used by authoritarian or other regimes to restrict the 'net, that'd suck. However, as it stands the Internet is largely controlled through a hugely disparate network of institutions, but much of the decisionmaking power and a lot of the technical implementation is in America (as far as I know; correct me if I'm wrong). So as much as the ITU might give itself regulatory power, and then attempt to enforce that regulatory power, eventually it'll have to turn to the actual member states to recognize it and enforce its decisions. At that point, wouldn't the US just refuse to acknowledge it, and then the entire idea would collapse?

The UN is bad circlejerk is strong with this one. The proposals people are freaking out about - particularly the taxes and Russia/Iran's snooping - are the ones that won't pass. You all seem to forget that there are 193 countries at work here, not just the Arab league + China and Russia. The MAIN document, the important one, contains no provisions relating to internet control. [[1]]( The claims this is trying to enforce censorship? Article 34 of the ITU treaty already allows countries to block whatever they want, so long as they justify it. That's why CP is able to be legally blocked; it serves an important role. I am fully aware this article can be abused to block people's communication. HOWEVER. Article 33 states that all citizens in all countries have the right to use the internet for unhindered communication. [[2]]( The right to secrecy is covered in article 35. As it is now, all telecommunications - not just the internet - SHOULD be secret unless the government has good reason for suspicion, I believe. Russia + Iran's proposals won't pass because they directly conflict with this right to secrecy. The ITU, like most of the UN bar the Security Council and ICJ + ICC, is a non-binding entity . NOTHING they put forward is legally binding until member states choose to ratify it. The US wouldn't choose to ratify a proposal of signing over DNS servers, meaning that even if that particular proposal passes fuck all happens. The same goes for the proposals on billing access; they would only occur if a country implemented them, and even then you can bypass it in two seconds flat because proxies. "Many Recommendations (standards) were widely considered to be binding prior to 1988 • In other fields, it is common for laws or regulations to give binding force to standards developed by private organizations: electricity, plumbing, accounting, etc. • Recommendations can only be made mandatory if a national authority makes them so" [[3]] ( Even if these passed, the freaking out about 'z0mg un+interfering in mah lief' is largely unfounded. Like I said, these proposals are RECOMMENDATIONS. They are NOT legally binding unless a country signs and ratifies them. [this] ( is probably the best summary of the proposed changes on here. The reality is, most of what's on the table here won't pass. The stuff that does pass is a recommendation, and although a lot of what the ITU puts forward becomes standards not everything does. The freaking out going on here makes sense, but really, most of the stuff being freaked out about is unimportant.

You are very blindly sucking the D of Microsoft and forgetting/forgiving all of their past mistakes. Even today, a lot of what they do and the products they put out are ugly, don't work, don't follow standards, are too confusing, too expensive, etc! You are mistaking my post, I am not a fanboy in the slightest. My point is they get criticized for anything that they do no matter how successful it might be. >Xbox- Red ringing, large, heavy, loud, underpowered pos. New Xboxs are much improved but now Live has a shit ton of ads and you can't even watch Netflix without buying a Live subscription. Yeah, I would agree that was a hickup, I had an Xbox Red Ring on me, but it was bought from Ebay so I was within the return period so I got a full refund from it. I didn't buy an Xbox again until 2 years later when Halo 3 came out. Even with the RROD issue, they were able to recover and Xbox360 is one of the highest selling consoles. I don't have an Xbox now but from screenshots and such I would agree, they need to tone down the ads. >Windows 8- I use it and enjoy it. No real complaints. But if they would take out the entire Metro interface I think I'd be much happier. It looks fine, but serves no real purpose but to confuse people. In general though, Windows feels very stagnant. other than metro, 8 is basically the exact same as 7, which is very similar to Vista. I feel like I'm buying packages that optimize the code and re-theme everything, not new versions of the OS. I would agree with that to an extent, Metro UI was only put in place to coincide with Windows Phone, a choice that may or may not pay off. I only picked up Win8 because it was 40$ , I would have stuck with Win7 for the forseeable future (or downloaded a pirated copy) had it been only available at retail price. >Windows Phone- WP is so far behind because you remember the bullshit they were releasing before? It had a fucking start button and stylus! Ffs, not 3-4 years later they have WP8 which is actually worthwhile, but people are already invested in other ecosystems. Never used Windows Phone myself, but it would agree, it had its short comings. I would also agree that WP8 may be too late in the game to make any sort of splash. >Office- 2013 is awesome. 2010 is great too but why are there so many different versions? Student, university, 365, home, premium. Way too confusing to keep up with and to try and figure out how to and where you can install it (how many keys you get). And still unavailable on the popular mobile OSes. While I like to support any dev, I have always pirated Office Suites, I only really use Word anyways, and occasionally Excel but I would agree with this statement as well. >

Hey, almost like every version of Windows before XT... slam competitor's OS as deeply flawed, promise the moon with the soon to be released Windows version... release piece of shit Windows Version that breaks every piece of software you're using that competes with a Microsoft product, and is nearly as stable as a novice tightrope walker with Parkinson's. (every release seemed designed to break Wordperfect, I lost several 100 pages of a novel I was working on in 1992 because a Windows update broke WordPerfect, it wouldn't let me install a previous version of Windows... and the WP was the latest release available. At the time Word still sucked Ass compared to WP. Word wouldn't recognize the WP format, I didn't know anyone else who owned a computer at the time, HDDs were no longer being made that were compatible with my controller, so I couldn't just swap out the drive like today and install a previous version... Fuck You Microsoft!)

The problem isn't with windows RT. The issue is with the price differential, the amount you can do with an windows 8 x64 is easily worth the price difference between the two. Maybe if they were cheaper, I like my surface RT but I'm going to upgrade it to a surface pro because I have too much disposable income but mainly because I feel like the added feature set justifies the cost. I'll likely just give the RT to my parents as they seemed quite into it when I was home for xmas.

Tablet Market Share by Manufacturer Q3 2012: Apple: 50.4 Samsung: 18.4 Amazon: 9.0 Asus: 8.6 Lenovo: 1.4 Everybody Else: 12.2 You can add up all of the other manufacturers that could be making an RT tablet and you barely get over Samsung's number in terms of market share. Nokia isn't even on the list.

they could make the best damn thing is the world and people would still complain You are very blindly sucking the D of Microsoft and forgetting/forgiving all of their past mistakes. Even today, a lot of what they do and the products they put out are ugly, don't work, don't follow standards, are too confusing, too expensive, etc! Xbox- Red ringing, large, heavy, loud, underpowered pos. New Xboxs are much improved but now Live has a shit ton of ads and you can't even watch Netflix without buying a Live subscription. Windows 8- I use it and enjoy it. No real complaints. But if they would take out the entire Metro interface I think I'd be much happier. It looks fine, but serves no real purpose but to confuse people. In general though, Windows feels very stagnant. other than metro, 8 is basically the exact same as 7, which is very similar to Vista. I feel like I'm buying packages that optimize the code and re-theme everything, not new versions of the OS. Windows Phone- WP is so far behind because you remember the bullshit they were releasing before? It had a fucking start button and stylus! Ffs, not 3-4 years later they have WP8 which is actually worthwhile, but people are already invested in other ecosystems. Office- 2013 is awesome. 2010 is great too but why are there so many different versions? Student, university, 365, home, premium. Way too confusing to keep up with and to try and figure out how to and where you can install it (how many keys you get). And still unavailable on the popular mobile OSes. When they pull their shit together, people will hop back on the bandwagon. Until then, to hell with Microsoft.

In fact, x86 hasn't been a pure CISC architecture in a long time. I think it was NexGen that started the trend with their Nx586. CISC instructions were translated on the fly to run on what was internally a RISC architecture. All modern "x86" CPUs are actually very close to a RISC design and internally they're every bit as efficient as any RISC chip. The situation is even better than that! Because the x86 instruction set is so dense in terms of instruction encoding you can fit more x86 instructions in the CPU cache than you can with fixed sized ARM instructions. (This is one of the motivations behind ARM's Thumb/Thumb2 encoding schemes, to reduce the size of code in memory!) This means you can get less CPU cache misses for the same amount of i-cache (instruction cache) on x86 CPUs, which leads to higher performance.

It's kinda expected though. Look at it this way. When he was co-CEO the company went in his direction. Wrong as it may have been, in his eyes it was 100% correct and consumers are wrong. Enter in this new CEO. He's moving the company in a different direction from Jim's. In Jim's eyes what this new guy is doing is all wrong and going to destroy his company. This new direction is in fact a better one (I wouldn't say it's the best one though). So since he feels this isn't the right direction of course he's going to sell off.

Except that it's not really reflective of service to netflix. If I offer a 100Mb/s server and a 5Mb/s service, and 99% of my customers use the 5Mb/s service and then do other browsing while watching netflix, my netflix numbers are going to be bad. But those users could have faster service, they just choose not to. Without accounting for the price people are paying for the service they get it's only telling you the average user speed. Not the speed available for a sensible price. And that's not necessarily related to the speed available. If you want to spend 10 dollars a month for your internet don't expect a 100Mb/s connection. If a vast majority of users pick the 10 dollar a month option they don't really get to complain when they have really low speeds. Putting clearwire on the same chart as google fibre is nonsense. E.g. I have 75Mb/s connection with a 250 GB monthly cap, I was at a friends house on the weekend, and he has 5Mb/s connection with a 100GB cap. Both are $100/month roughly. I live in a city, he lives about 40Km outside the nearest one, so there's no cable, no dsl, 3G is absurdly more expensive). Is it that his ISP is screwing him? Kinda... certainly he's getting less speed for his money. But if it would cost 200k to have them install cable his deal seems pretty good.

I don't think this is for the net connection in general, I think this is how much Netflix pipes to the average consumer. When I watch Netflix I may be sharing my connection with at least one other person streaming video and/or games, there could be downloads - I could even be uploading work to FTP. Also, another thing to keep in mind is that Netflix's video compression is dark, dark magic. I streamed two episodes of Prison Break to my iPad and counted the data and it claimed I used 50mb after that.

Why do these commands create a better streaming experience? TWC is throttling downloads from servers (CDN) that host cached videos. By rejecting these IP address ranges you will force the video to be served to you directly. This harnesses the full download speed of your internet connection. Other people can dive into the complexity much better than I ever could, but that’s the overall theme.

I'm not sure where RCN falls into this, but I've had nothing but good experiences with RCN in Chicago. Even when they implemented P2P throttling on seeding, their CTO wrote an articulate and reasonable justification (

Although the ISP's are smart. They know that google will only launch it in a handful of cities within in the next few years. Its doubtful Google Fiber will even go to every major city at all. Until google announces plans to do that, ISP's will just pull out of Google Fiber's areas (Or actually improve service, or something to compete)

It's possible that imbolaw meant 192khz as a sampling rate. A really damn high sampling rate at that. CD quality is 44.1khz. I don't think YouTube can handle that. This is separate from bit depth, (measured in kb/s) which is what I think he meant. Think of bit depth as the perceived "clarity" of a sound file. [This article does a great job of explaining the two terms.](

You really wouldn't want to pirate vinyl records since the sound waves on it are analogous to the original tapes ( equivalent to nearly unlimited sample rate/bit depth) or in some cases extremely hi-def digital files. You'd have to quantize the analog source as they did with CD/DVD/bluray audio, and by extension mp3s and the like, and then print it from there. Even extremely high resolution printers would digitize the analog source. Plus, other than the audiophile sound quality, records almost always come with awesome looking large sized artwork.

The Redbook CD (44.1khz/16 bit) standard does NOT properly capture original analog sources. If you've ever worked at a studio with all analog instruments printed directly to tape at 15 or 30 IPS (guitars without digital effects, electromechanical keyboards such as Hammond B3 organ through a Leslie speaker or a Fender Rhodes electric piano, a Moog or ARP synthesizer, real drums, real saxophones, trumpets, etc and listen back to it with at least a half decent engineer working you will hear an enormous, "3D" sound stage. With the highest quality converters a 24 bit 96 kHz copy of the audio will retain much of the nuance...but 44.1/16, "CD quality" certainly will not. The standard used by CDs was outdated 20 years ago. Vinyl is pretty much the next best thing to the original master tape in the way it captures the sound wave...it is analogous to the source, rather than a digital snapshot. Of course if the master recording is a 16 bit file recorded to a Mac book with Protools, the whole point is moot.

I used to tape songs from the radio onto a compact cassette when I was a kid. I didn't buy any fewer albums than I otherwise would have bought.

My setup (described in my previous post) is not bad. My only complaint is that the lawyers at Pioneer put a ton of warning screens that you need to click on "OK" before you can do anything. Total time between ignition and Spotify goodness is only about 30 seconds or so with the warnings. The radio otherwise is not laggy. On long trips running google navigation, spotify, and trapster, my phone will get hot and start to lag a bit. The appradio simply mirrors the display of the phone. If it seems slow, it means the phone is slow. Bottom line is that this setup is a hack, and should be approached with some patience.

That's how it's always been, and sadly, I don't have much to offer. Most of my friends in college were tech-heads/DJs/etc., so mooched off their access. People with access aren't going to endanger that access by publicizing/offering you a way to get in, usually because invites are tied to a 'tree' system, so if I (user A) offer an invite to you (user B), I have to be able to vouch for your ratio/using habits. If you (User B) fall below a certain ratio, or upload crappy torrents, and get kicked out, they take a look at my account more closely. Also these sites like flying under the radar, so for the most part, users don't publicize account/tracker details.

I used to watch tv quite a bit growing up and with multiple people watching it is more reasonable to have that cost. It is just since I moved out from home i've not paid for cable since it is too expensive for as much use as I get. Saving 25% on your bill is great. It is just sad that the companies pay what I would imagine to be pennies on the dollar for the low quality service they provide.

Ive had foxtel for years (Australian Pay TV) and only recently cut it off. $70 a month just is too much. The amount of ads is rediculous. For paying for PAY TV, you then have like 1/3rd of the time being ads. Years ago, say 10 years, There was hardly any ads. Now its just full on ads. The normal TV channels are fine, sure theres not much on half the time... But I can just put stuff on USBs, then into the TV. Or just watch things online. Pay TV is just a joke since they give more ads than regular TV it seems here in Australia. Also $70 AU a month is pretty steep. I pay that for my internet, which is worth it. But $70 a month for repeat after repeat, ad galore Pay TV? No thanks. I miss it, only cut it off say a month and a half ago, but theres no way I am getting it back. I would only tape stuff anyway, then watch them so I didn't have to see the same insurance and banking ads nonstop

Transaction malleability: There is a receipt generated with a bitcoin transaction, similar to what you get at a register when you pay with a credit card. That receipt says "this transaction went through, for 1.242 bitcoin, to this address." If you have another receipt printed in your pocket that says "Transaction error", you can say to the attendant that "Hey, your system messed up and didn't give me my money". Nothing actually has changed with the transmission of the money, you just have a fake receipt that you're trying to bring up to the equivalent of a help-desk for a refund. At this point, a reasonable exchange would have a customer service rep step in and look at the transaction history, check the blockchain for outgoing transactions, see if the money was sent or not. They would see that your receipt is fake, and probably close your account for trying to scam them. Gox on the other hand, was stupid. They hooked up an automated process that simply saw receipts and re-sent transactions automatically any time it saw a bounced transaction. And then they never checked their internal balances so they never saw that they were losing hundreds of bitcoins every day for a year.

Civilian hobbyists can already do practically everything you're describing. The only practical issue that I can see at the moment is the difficulty with viewing faces from above. Facial recognition had real trouble identifying those, last time I looked. The real problem is the amount of skill (and time) involved in creating this. With the skills to do this, there's more practical ways to gain power and fame (presumably to advance your creepy political agenda. Or whatever other reason someone would have to make flying bombs).

What can you do better than it? I can better predict how another driver is likely to react, because I s/he is human too. If I see a BMW driving a hair faster in traffic, tailgating and braking slowly, I know he's likely to cut me off if he has even close to enough space. I know if I see a driver checking their phone while driving an oversized SUV down the highway to give them LOTS of space and spend a minimum amount of time in their blind spot. I know when I see a truck with an unsecured load to stay well away in case something tumbles out (happened last year, a friggin' giant copier smashed into the fast lane out of an open UHaul! Saw the dangerous truck and gave it plenty of room.) I know when I'm stopped at a blind intersection, if I hear squealing tires, DONT go through (happened many years ago - missed being T-boned by inches). Yes, each of these situations could be avoided by very complex software, but I don't think we're there yet. We will be - I don't doubt it - and these scenarios will be significantly more rare with more self-driving cars.

Not for nothing, but which came first? The genre/aesthetic, the style, or the purpose? Did someone predict the future, or do those old cyber_dystopians go that way because someone has been researching this for a while? I was confused reading that back to myself, so I'll try again

Just as an FYI, and usual IANAL disclaimer applies here: In the UK there's a piece of legislation that says you're not supposed to wear masks in a "protected area". It's covered as part of Section 60AA of the Public Order Act 1984, and its original intention was for it to be used as a temporary measure ordered by higher ranking officers only in the case of organised riots, but new measures now mean that a permanent or semi-permanent Section 60AA order can be declared on a specific area for any reason. The small park square in London that has, among other embassies, the front of the US Embassy facing it, has one of these permanent Section 60AA orders, and as such police officers have the power to ask you to remove any face-obscuring clothing (masks, scarves, etc.) or search you without reasonable suspicion or warrant in that area. Note that wearing a mask in that area is not an offense, but you would be committing an arrestable public order offense if you either refused to follow an officer's instructions to remove it, or put it back on afterwards. I've experienced this first-hand when I was involved in an anti-ACTA protest, part of which took place in front of the US embassy. Police asked us to remove masks and explained that the area was covered by a Section 60AA order. We Googled it for verification and complied, and they were reasonable about the whole affair. The armed guards at the embassy even came and had a chat with us. So the

So I feel compelled to explain one of the strange paradoxes of a programmer's job that this thread has raised. Code is cheap, but it's expensive to produce code. You can go on websites like Github, bitbucket, etc, and find vast libraries of code being given away for free with very liberal licensing terms. Google and Apple and Microsoft all just hand over code that cost millions in salary and other business costs to make and maintain. But the best code is small and single purpose while being flexible and durable. To understand it, pretend you have a limited understanding of english but have to write a novel. You would start by trying to write small sentences and then having them evaluated. No that's junk, that's gibberish, and that one demonstrates the reading comprehension of an 8 year old. Okay, the one sentence that meant anything, you use that to try writing paragraphs, and then have that evaluated. Now you're writing like a 9 year old. On your way to writing a chapter, you hit a wall. How do you describe the setting when you were only writing about one character. And shit, now we have to introduce a second character. And jeez, they have different genders and different personalities. What I just described there is the problem of being a programmer. Abstractions and details clash. It'd be very nice to solve two separate problems and then solve bigger problems as a composition of two already solved things. But the free market begs to differ. Consumers don't purchase code, they buy apps and browse websites. And companies don't buy code, because it's cheap enough to write themselves. So for a long time, all code was written as an integrated mess that took months to understand and modify simple things. The way to cut that gordians knot was for the profession to admit that we were all suffering from the same problems. Our apps and websites are different, but we all need lists and database and memory allocation and MVC frameworks. This is where code is cheap. Jquery is an almost universally used javascript library. And the maintainers do really good work with it. But its so much less expensive for everyone in the industry to just accept it as cheap free code and make a donation to their organization, than to deal with IE6. The alternative is to blow a billion dollars writing your own browser, which Google has done, but noone will pay for.

I'm pretty impressed they even caught the guy. Think about it, triangulation is great at locating stationary objects, but this guy was moving around being effectively shielded by loads of other moving objects. I can only guess there was other instrumentation used to gauge the signal strength once they got closer.

I saw the preview/trailer for that show and couldn't get over the bad science in it. It's also a JJ Abrams show, which means I'd probably like the premise but it would derail completely and become a show about something else in the 3rd season which would utterly piss me off.

Every research project jn the United States must go through a review board ("IRB") to be approved to make sure it is being done ethically. This was started up after the government did a few things to Tuskegee airmen [a bunch of people including the infamous Tuskegee institute experiments on syphilis]( and mad scientists got a little too mad in the middle of the 20th century. Now with a lot of minimal, no risk, and completely anonymous studies or ones where the subject not being deceived would alter the outcome of the experiment certain exceptions are sometimes made and the requirement to obtain consent can be waived BUT this always requires irb approval and must be rationalized by the researcher and found to not pose risk by the board. It turns out that the experiment facebook ran was worked on by researchers at UCSF and they very much have an irb process. As far as I know they never got irb approval. Also the study potentially posed some psychological risk if they were in fact able to alter people's emotions negatively. The EULA for Facebook likely doesn't hold any weight as far as irb approval and consent goes because that is federal law which I beeline trumps facebook law.

The researchers who conducted this experiment also do work for the DoD. That means absolutely nothing, university researchers are generally involved in projects with dozens of different government agencies and companies. If you looked at my resume you would see 3 government agencies and 6 private companies who have funded me, and I'm just getting started. Reading the actual paper and I still have to go through IRB approval. Here's what they have to say about it: >LIWC was adapted to run on the Hadoop Map/Reduce system (11) and in the News Feed filtering system, such that no text was seen by the researchers. As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research. I don't know what the precedent is on using TOS as informed consent for research, but that seems pretty weak to me. Regardless, this is a garbage article. Of course the DoD is researching civil unrest on social media. I'd be disappointed if they weren't since that's a huge part of what they're dealing with in the Middle East. These researchers are experts in the field, so it's no surprise that they also do work for the DoD. The paper itself isn't exactly groundbreaking. It's 3 pages long, and all it says is people's posts are affected by what their friends post about. It's in PNAS because of the unique collaboration with Facebook.

Consumers stopped informing themselves, demanded corps and govts protect themselves from themselves (anyone who studies product liability can attest to this), and stopped taking pains to make sure their legal rights were/are protected.

I'm not a lawyer (yet) but this is a somewhat complex question. In theory, any of the people that were involved in the study could be a potential plaintiff. The (really) hard part would be demonstrating that your client a. was part of the study b. did not consent to participation in the study (by signing the TOS) c. had a demonstrable injury capable of redress I wouldn't think you would prevail against facebook by only being able to argue that your client's emotional state was potentially adversely affected for an indeterminate time in an unquantifiable way.

Informed consent may be waived by the IRB if four conditions are met. the research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects; the waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects; the research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver or alteration; and whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation. I'd say the facebook experiment meets all of these conditions, and obviously the IRB did too. To be honest, I don't see what all the fuss is about. It's a really interesting experiment. A lot of valuable, statistically significant data were collected on a topic we wouldn't have been able to test on this scale or through this medium 2 or 3 years ago. The world is changing fast, it's important to see in what direction it might be headed. Computer Mediated Communication is a vastly unexplored area, and getting more unexplored every day because of social media's rapid rate of progression. I also think it's silly that people are outraged at the government for helping collect these data. Of course they want to help with this experiment! It had the potential to give a veritable fuckton of insight into the way emotions are transferred through computers . Why wouldn't they help? They have way more to gain than to lose. The research is linked to research about civil unrest because the two are part of a much larger mosaic of the transference of emotion.

Obama never was a last hope and he never was different. Politicians have carefully designed and crafted personas, built to conveya certain image. Just like pro wrestlers. But they're just façades. Here's a couple more: "Sarah Barracuda" Palin - the go-getter corruption buster - LIE W Bush - the trustworthy, relatable, not-like-those- other -politicians, everyday guy - LIE Obama -

93% of black voters picked Obama. That is some serious racial bias. [Blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic for ages - since FDR.]( The percentage has only increased over the years. Suggesting blacks voted for Obama en masse just because he's black is just dumb. At best, he got a small boost from people who generally don't turn out to vote at all, but would be highly unlikely to vote Republican in the first place. By way of comparison, [91% of blacks voted for Mondale in '84]( 91% . For the one of the whitest motherfuckers to ever run for POTUS.

Far be it from me to dispute your quite popular circlejerk, but in each of the things you cite (the ones that are't utter fabrications, of course), Obama was LIED to by the NSA and CIA, just as Congress and the Congressional oversight committees were LIED to. How do you expect them to give you an accurate report if the source is LYING to you right from the get go?! For example, if I lie to you and tell you that I didn't kill that animal, and then you speak before the nation and say "he didn't kill that animal", and then it turns up that I really did kill that animal, why are you blaming the person who was LIED to just like you were?! Well, of course, it's human nature...at first. But we have minds that can understand things in context given new information. Or, at least, most of us do. Obama is the ONLY person who has actually DONE anything about the NSA. Not congress, not the oversight committees, not the judiciary or the Supreme Court. Only Obama massively curtailed their activities upon coming into office. He did it again upon being reelected. And he is doing it again now. But in all of those cases, he didn't curtail things that he had been assured weren't happening. And according to the law and his orders, couldn't and shouldn't be happening. How could he?! But the CIA and NSA lied again and again to everyone up the food chain. Now should come the repercussions of that lying to the executive and legislative branches of government. If Obama doesn't deal with this as he really should, then I'll be coming over to your side on this (except I will actually have facts to support my position). But if he does bring these men to account, I suspect that you will still ignore those actions, as you have everything else he has actually done to reign in the NSA, and continue to blame him for the illegal and unsanctioned actions of the NSA, CIA, and Cheney Inc's remaining cronies. Or will you use that evolved brain of yours to comprehend and acknowledge the actual cause and effect of this unconstitutional fiasco?

You will see that this is a much more balanced, fact-checked version of events. Notice how Congress has blocked the measures that Obama couldn't enact via executive order. Also notice how this doesn't deal with the issues of Obama and the Congress being lied to about everything from the FISA court being a rubberstamp to what the NSA and CIA were actually recording and doing vs. what they claimed they were recording and doing. The rest of your post is actually relevant to the internal review of staff and statutes he is doing right now. If he goes too far one way, he risks critics claiming that he is "soft on terrorism". If he goes too far the other, he faces critics claiming that he is caving in to the liars and the spies. Since Obama is now immune from needing to be reelected and has a Congress that isn't working with him anyway, I suspect we will see more action from him over the next year or so (especially after the midterm elections in Nov). Along those lines, I suspect that Brennan will be forced to retire sometime soon. But he's pretty much damned if he does, damned if he doesn't...and it's all because we didn't throw Cheney Inc in prison when we had the chance. No, we reelected those war criminals for a second term. Now, whose fault was that?

What fucking tyranny? A company that produces films trying to combat piracy is not tyranny, you ignorant shit, it's called protecting their property. I don't agree with their methods, but don't you fucking start with the "information wants to be free" bullshit. You don't have to like what they do, but don't come up with these autismal internet pirate explanations for why something both illegal and dangerous was done. You can pirate all you want, but leaking people's personal information is not a fucking good thing.

Most people don't. Most people who aren't Google/Android nut huggers don't use Google+, at least not on purpose. That's why Google has to coerce and trick and scam people into having Google+ accounts and make you go way out of your way just to obliterate every trace of it. You get one by default if you touch Gmail or look at Youtube or think about Android. Some people probably like this, but Google's hyper-aggressive moves to try and tie every piece of online identity and communications together are one of the things that I find really repulsive about Android and Google in general. Some people just want to use the Internet and don't necessarily want every goddamn thing they ever do or say online to be all tied together with their identity and republished all over the fucking place and cataloged so Google can super-target the advertising they chase us around the Internet with and so serial killers and psycho ex-girlfriends can learn absolutely everything about you thanks to the public online dossier Google builds on us all by default unless we do some crazy web-ninja gymnastics to actively rid ourselves of all of Googles shit (and you'll never get rid of it all).

When you're in an office environment & your lazy-ass co-workers never clean up after themselves. I have keurig at home & the office. Will probably switch to French press at home soon, but kcups seem to be the way to go at work.

It never tastes as good as what I make in my press, but I have one of these machines too. It costs more per cup and doesn't have the same flavour, but I use it because I can walk by it, put my cup in push the button and carry on doing something else for 5-10 minutes then grab the coffee. I know I could leave a pot on and get the same ease of use, but I don't drink enough, fast enough for it to not be a waste/taste stale. I could just relax, take 10 minutes and make a cup in my press and often I do that instead.

Many lawsuits have occurred, but the company that produces these clips (Rogers) have been successful in continuing to fight the silly DRM that Keurig came up with. Which is quite impressive, considering Rogers is a family run company and certainly doesn't have the deep pockets of Keurig. You can read about the legal history here: Direct article link from the Guardian here: To summarize the article- Rogers (company that makes the freedom clip) pre-emptively sued Keurig because they saw the DRM coming and won. Keurig unsuccessfully appealed the decision, US Court affirmed, and now they include Freedom clips in every purchase, 100% legal.

Something tells me your completely objective and unbiased documentary forgot to mention this little discovery 5 years prior to its release Also, while it's true that most drinking bottles use mostly "virgin" plastic, most recycling centers do in fact down cycle plastic bottles. The down cycled plastic can be cast into useful things such as tables and chairs or other plastic items, and some of it does end up in "greener" bottles. It's just not a closed loop so people can technically claim it's not true recycling.

In my previous job, there was a 'coffee club' where people in my office would chip in for coffee, someone would buy huge barrels from Costco and they'd all have free use of it and the coffee maker in the break room. Except I didn't like the coffee and didn't feel like dealing with the coffee club. And I had a nice supply of my preferred coffee from Puerto Rico (Yaucono. Dksclamer: I am Puerto Rican). So I bought a little four cup drip coffee machine for ten bucks at Target and decided I'd make my own coffee. That is when I ran into the biggest problem. Coffee poachers. If I did not sit and wait for my coffee to brew before my eyes, some asshole would poach it. I didn't mind people using the coffee maker but stealing my coffee without a word was pissing me off. This persisted despite polite notes left. Finally I took my coffee maker home, brought in an electric kettle and a French press. The coffee was better and no one could poach it since I could make my coffee at my desk.

In the past it has been in companies advantages to fight for your rights for the protection of your privacy, it was less work for them and it made their customers happy and loyal. But in the last decade something happened. They stopped that and have slowly been moving more and more towards a nanny state. You haven't been paying attention have you? I'll sum it as thus: Tech companies are PISSED at Washington and with each reveal they only get madder not to mention most of these companies were being FORCED to help spy and they don't like it and drives people away and makes others not want to do business with them and bills like this? They wouldn't make much difference and really just add more hurdles in exchange for few if any returns for their efforts. And as it said already: It wouldn't stop attacks or really much of anything. Just makes the haystacks even bigger.

Copyright law distances itself from theft of services. So... no. Good try though. >You're deluding yourself. Okay, sure. >You have your own private definition Private, okay. >Make sure to give the next person who says someone stole their idea a ream of shit because by your private definition since he still has the idea he can't use the word theft. Will do, ream piece of shit. Edit: > Oh yeah. All this "watching what you didn't pay for" stuff comes from the early days of stealing cable. Which is theft of services. A similar but different act is called theft, so what we're talking about is theft too!1 Murder is closer to theft than copyright infringement is. >Yep. Private. Everyone else recognizes that theft has multiple meanings and definitions Yes, except not everyone realizes which ones are used on legal scales. There, there's a clear difference between actual theft and piracy. >and you're trying to pretend some of them don't exist No, I just called you out because you're wrong on legal basis. And physical one, try that video I linked above.

Murder is closer to theft than copyright infringement is. No it isn't you fucking imbecile. Copyright is indisputably a form of theft, or at the very least "theft-like" by the very codification of the law, grouped as it is alongside a dozen other "theft-like but not actually called theft" offenses under the heading "STOLEN PROPERTY" in the U.S Law Code. (Chapter 113, Title 18 if you're curious) As happyscrappy mentioned, physical deprivation isn't a prerequisite for all types of theft. See for instance: theft of services, identity theft, theft of trade secrets (etc) And for the record, Dowling was a narrow ruling which pertained only to whether copyright can be considered theft under the National Stolen Property Act, not in any general sense. A later Supreme Court ruling said this: "Deliberate unlawful copying is no less an unlawful taking of property than garden-variety theft." - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 961 (2005)

I realize that in this situation, the proper Reddit response is to rage about corporate abuse, but we should keep in mind that trademarks are much weaker than patents or copyrights; even with a registered trademark, it is still up to Facebook to prove that some specific use of the word face confuses their service with something else. This trademark only means that social networking sites will not be able to use the word face in a way that implies that their product is associated with facebook.

I now realize my post was a bit long, I should have added a

You're interacting with Linux, Unix, Microsoft, Oracle, etc etc etc on a daily basis. Far more often than you know, sure. But it's the right tool for the right job. Those tools you reference, aren't best-in-breed. Theyre simply Microsoft's tool for the job. You don't have to buy their entire ecosystem and live under vendor lock-in. | exchange I've yet to see Exchange servers with more than a year's uptime unless someone forgot they had it. Sure, this is mostly because it needs constant patching to remain (sort of) secure. Open-XChange, opengroupware, Citadel, Zimbra, Kolab. Open source, most of them available for commercial support contracts when your management gets all scared. | ISA, forefront Or don't run Microsoft from top to bottom, and have actual secure servers rather than shoveling it all info Exchange, SharePoint, and Communicator, which are bleeding sieves. ISA and Forefront's key features look like anything a firewall proxy server can do, and likely better. | SQL server, That's MSSQL. Try out MySQL or PostgreSQL for real databases if you're not going to jump into the lock-in from Oracle. | sharepoint, etc Sharepoint isn't exactly a bright shining star, sorry. As much as the training, sales, and marketing group managers at my old job loved it, all the important data was kept on systems that were actually secure. And frequently updated information was kept places people could actually find it. Its expensive, maintenance intensive. Maybe Zoho and HyperOffice are viable alternatives. Heck, even Lotus has an alternative. Or you could go the wiki route, or the more web-interface oriented routes, etc, ad nauseum. I don't have an absolutist hate for Microsoft, but I realize they're not the best or the only applications out there.

It's not about that. It is about who decides what is and is not going to be blocked. [AOL has been blocking content that conflicts with their business interests for years]( Here in the US, we have very little choice for internet service providors, and thus competition cannot ensure fair business practices. For example, at my current address I have exactly 1 choice for ISP (for a DSL connection). Anything else and I have to resort to satellite or a 3G connection, which is not functional for everything I do on the internet. If my ISP starts blocking websites because they believe they are 'copywright infringing' or if they just start blocking websites because they feel like it, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can't vote with my wallet, I only get one option, and internet service is required for my job and my lifestyle.

I'm sorry this is retarded. Lawyers are service providers who work at the behest of an often greedy client. They are representatives who present legal arguments that meet the elements of the law because their client has asked them to do so . The people you should be blaming are the corporations that lobby for this type of legislation. In fact, you play right into their hands if you start blaming the messengers/lawyers rather than the corporate assholes who are pulling strings to change the law to fit their desires.

Sometimes you have no choice, some companies supply internet connectivity to your area and you only have that company to choose from. You cable company doesn't decide what shows HBO broadcasts, it just is the middle man providing the link. ISPs are the same; they provide the connection, they should not monitor and censor the communication on that connection.

I did write out a lengthy response, arguing points and non-points alike, but then came to one of your last statements and realised we fundamentally disagree on the nub of this. > it's simply that I believe "intellectual property" is an oxymoron. I don't. In a world that allowed instantaneous, "free" copies of physical goods, a sculptor who had time creating a statue would hardly be criticised for being irritated by people creating copies of his work. This is essentially what software/music/etc piracy is - the fact that it's not a physical item is irrelevant because, were the same things possible with physical items, we'd react differently.

Firstly, as an ex-member of the insurance industry (in a humane and heavily regulated country, so we could never pull the shit that US business does daily), this is bollocks. Our interests were our profits, not ensuring universal coverage or ideal social outcomes (things that eat profits, not make them). We had the right to say no, and we exercised that right . Secondly, America is in love with the idea of the free market ensuring social outcomes. This too is bollocks. The idea that everyone should be able to say no, including the government, means that some portion of the population will go unserviced. Whilst this surely contributes to a healthier profit, socially and ethically it is a giant mistake - and the costs of that are paid by all . The unserviced don't magically disappear from all other societal calculations simply because you chose to ignore their needs - the costs just get shuffled somewhere else. Think of a fire service that could pick and choose which fires to put out - not everything should be run for (or even at) a profit. Only an idiot bean counter would think that having random houses burn down (presumably maiming and killing their occupants often) is not going to have run on effects in society (and its bottom line), but that is exactly the argument that is made in health.

sorry if I didn't make this clear, but the act is the point. causing damages to a film company through an act of film criticism, for better or for worse, is not a crime - you are decreasing the value of the company's work by producing a work of criticism which has intrinsic value of its own. causing damages to a film company by taking a work they sell and producing a copy of it which you give away for free, for better or for worse, is a crime - you are decreasing the value of the company's work by creating a trivial derivative work which can be used to substitute for that company's work. smashing a window (decreasing the value of a copyrighted work by undercutting the creator's prices on it without a license) is equally illegal whether it's a terrible $150 million blockbuster, or an indie film made on a $5,000 budget. agitating people to smash windows (decreasing the value of a copyrighted work by making a coherent argument that it's not worth their time) is equally legal. (as for the more philosophical argument about the damages caused by piracy, my personal belief is that the people who say "downloading X increases the market for X" and the people who say "downloading X decreases the market for X" are both right. the people who say it decreases the market are generally large film studios, who make single-use watch-and-forget spectacles for mass consumption; if you can get your single use out of the way in the comfort of your own home, they miss out on your $10 ticket and concession stand charges. the people who say it increases the market are generally independent creators, whose works probably wouldn't even get a chance to be shown except to the art-school set, were it not for nontraditional forms of distribution.

if you think this is shady use a different iso maker. NOTE: any free one will ask to install a toolbar. hrmmm -if you expect an software to remember your old homepage and to revert upon uninstallation you are going to have to take your computer to GeekSquad to fix. -your efforts will be futile in the end as free products can never be free, just remember to uncheck things during installation -EDIT:

I don't have a whole lot to say that will really benefit the conversation other than the fact that I wish I had it as an option. I just moved here from a place where I could game with no lag, open webpages in a snap and overall just have an enjoyable browsing experience. The best thing around here is satellite internet which costs my family $135 with a 25GB limit on downloading/uploading. There are cheaper versions of the service, but they limit it even more with slower speeds and smaller limits. I feel like we're getting ripped off and wish Broadband was available up here. I know, this is a first world problem, but it's such a nuisance and I hate being ripped of like this. They essentially advertise it as like broadband but you would have to pay the highest amount to get those results. Here's a speed test result: